As a bullied kid I cheered the small & the weak that gave us antibiotics - but I also cheered on 'abundant safe Atomic Energy too cheap to meter'

Okay, so I couldn't sense the total conflict between being in open commensality with Nature and supporting the closed-in synthetic autarky of atom-smashing research until much later in life.

But I don't think I was alone in my postwar generation of children - not by a long shot.

In the late summer of '65 I was newly in Grade Nine in a school system that seemed unchanged from the 1930s while the NY World's Fair was still celebrating the 1930s synthetic autarky of living better chemically, atomically and as far away from Nature as possible.

But by June '67, while I was still in Grade Ten, the Monterey Pop Festival with its musicians , hair  styles and above all its colourful offbeat clothing  were the talk of my High School, a long 3000 cultural miles from the counter culture Bay area.

For this was what had become of the buttoned down shirt of 1965, now on the lam and back to the land : the famous summer of (open commensal) love.

Still, it was only as an adult that I seriously wondered how on earth I and my generation got that way---- going from modernity to postmodernity in what seemed at the time (and still does) a historical mere blink of the eye : MO goes PO.

That lead, ultimately, to the researching of my book on the very Janus-headed legacy left to us postwar kids by two wildly different groups of grey-haired fathers and grandfathers of 1940 Manhattan ...